Leadership Quote by Parris Glendening

Memory is doing the heavy lifting here. By reaching back to "the Depression", Parris Glendening isn’t just describing a drought; he’s conscripting a national trauma to make today’s shortage feel like an emergency that overrides normal politics. It’s a historian’s yardstick deployed as a governor’s blunt instrument: if conditions rhyme with the 1930s, then delay starts to look negligent.

The sentence works because of its piling-on structure. "This dry... this low... this low... this low" is rhythmic, almost prosecutorial. Each repetition narrows the listener’s escape routes. You might shrug off a parched lawn, but you can’t as easily shrug off rivers, water tables, and reservoirs all collapsing at once. Glendening is building a case that the problem is systemic, not cosmetic: it’s not just what you see, it’s what’s failing underneath.

The subtext is aimed at behavior and budgets. Drought rhetoric is often a backdoor to unpopular asks: restrictions, rate hikes, infrastructure spending, regional cooperation, maybe even limits on growth. By framing the crisis as historically rare, he pre-justifies those moves and inoculates himself against the predictable backlash ("overreaction", "government overreach"). It also spreads accountability: if the drought is Depression-level, then the public’s consumption habits and local planning decisions get pulled into the storyline, too.

Contextually, it reflects the political reality that water policy only becomes legible when it becomes visceral. Glendening is making scarcity narratable - and therefore governable.